My family home was targeted in a vile anti-Semitic attack in Sydney. This is what I kept quiet until now – and the question every Australian needs to ask themselves

Alex Ryvchin is the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. 

When I was shaken from sleep by my panicked wife early one Friday morning a few weeks ago, to the news that our former home was targeted in an anti-Semitic attack, many thoughts and emotions came to me.

Shock was not among them. There was nothing unusual in the morning’s chaos. 

In the past 15 months, many times, I have been woken by calls from media, staff, police or politicians informing me that a synagogue was burning, that cars daubed with anti-Semitic slogans were burning, and that yet another Jewish target was hit.

This time it was the place where my wife and I first brought our daughter home from the hospital and where during the pandemic we hunkered down as a family and I valiantly attempted to homeschool my eldest daughter before she refused to call me, ‘Mr Ryvchin’ and the whole thing ended in tears. 

It was a deliriously happy home. Our sanctuary for five years from the carnage and chaos that occurs outside and over which we have so little control. But within those walls was only love.

Our old neighbour from across the street had recorded the scene and sent it to us. A fireball rising into the night sky. 

Red paint splashed on the walls I had myself painted white. On the vehicle in the adjoining driveway, which belongs to a Jewish couple in their 80s, ‘F—k the Jews’ was scrawled on one side, ‘F—k Israel’ on the other. Two sides of the same car and two sides of the same coin.

For 15 months I have shrugged off questions about my own safety. Not out of any great valour but more a symptom of my optimism. Being afraid is also no way to live.

For 15 months, the community has reeled from such attacks. 

In response, the common refrain by advocates and politicians has been to condemn them as ‘un-Australian,’ a great term that denotes conduct that runs contrary to who we are as a country. 

But a country, like an individual, is defined not by how they see themselves but how they actually behave.

A part of Australian behaviour has become to harass, intimidate, abuse and burn motivated by a hatred of the Jewish people. 

In the days after my former home was hit, a childcare centre in Maroubra was firebombed, a potentially devastating mass terror attack was disrupted, schools were daubed with more anti-Semitic slogans, and a man was arrested for allegedly daubing Stars of David on a private home in Melbourne before spitting and throwing bacon on a passerby.

A small minority is responsible for this conduct, but when the majority is silent, ambivalent or apathetic the conduct continues, it spreads and it starts to define a nation.

It didn’t begin with the former homes of Jewish leaders becoming targets for domestic terrorists. There was a very clear progression that we as a community saw and understood, while others receded into their own optimism or self-delusion that it would burn itself out before anything of note burned down.

Those who gathered on our streets to cheer gang rape, torture and the parading of mutilated civilians through Gazan streets on October 7 should have been met with national disgust and condemnation. 

On October 9, a mob gathered at the steps of Australia’s most iconic landmark, the Sydney Opera House, to burn flags, to warn Jews that ‘the armies of Mohammad were coming’ and to chant the words that ended up on burning cars outside my old home, ‘F—k the Jews.’

In response, those who ordinarily speak up against racism said nothing and in some cases sought to cast the Jewish community as untrustworthy and scheming. 

A national conversation was kicked off by hack activist-journalists about whether ‘gas the Jews’ was really chanted, as reported, or whether it was just ‘F—k the Jews’ and ‘where’s the Jews’, as if the alternatives were any better. 

This allowed the real issue of chilling mob racism to be trivialised and suspicion to descend on the Jewish community.

Government should have acted decisively at that point but it dithered, which opened the door for more extreme political forces to enter the fray. 

Everything that has happened has been predictable, and was warned of. 

The fact that those who sadistically doxxed hundreds of Jews, and cheered as little kids chanted slogans associated with suicide bombings have retained their public grants and public salaries while so-called leaders delivered their platitudes about opposing all forms of racism, showed us that the Jewish community was for all intents and purposes, alone.

And exactly as we warned, because we’ve seen this play out again and again, it won’t end with words and it won’t end with the Jews. 

That’s because antisemitism is the enemy of rationalism and irrational people left unchecked do horrible things. 

The question before Australians now is will it end before someone gets killed?

Alex Ryvchin was born in Kiev, Ukraine. His family left the Soviet Union as refugees and refuseniks in 1987, when Alex was 3 years old. He attended Sydney Boys High School and went on to study law and politics at the University of New South Wales.

​He worked for a member of the NSW Legislative Council as a researcher and speechwriter before practising law at two of the world’s largest law firms, first at Mallesons Stephen Jaques in Sydney and then at Herbert Smith in London. He served as a spokesman for the Zionist Federation UK, and was awarded a prestigious Israel Research Fellowship to work as a research fellow and staff writer at a Jerusalem-based think-tank.

After 5 years abroad, in 2013 he returned to Australia and joined the Executive Council of Australian Jewry as Director of Public Affairs. He was promoted to co-Chief Executive Officer in February 2018 becoming one of the youngest leaders in the Jewish diaspora. He is a member of the Jewish Diplomatic Corps.